


What We Leave Behind

by KnightRepentant



Series: Last Angel in Heaven [8]
Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Backstory, Gen, Pre-War, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-01
Updated: 2018-04-01
Packaged: 2019-04-17 01:37:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14177751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KnightRepentant/pseuds/KnightRepentant
Summary: What once was, can never be again.





	What We Leave Behind

He couldn’t just be Sam anymore.

 

Sam Halloran was a little boy of six, chasing a dog between the legs of a wind turbine when the last of the rain came. Sam was a bunched up ball of anger and tears when the police came with papers that said they had to go. No rain meant no corn, no corn meant no money, no money...no farm.

 

Sam was a skinny kid of fourteen, his knees scuffed and his nose bloody, crying on a bench in a yellowing park. No lunch and no money to buy another. The city was tall and loud, the air was sour and stuck in his throat. The people smiled but the smiles looked like the ones he’d painted on eggshells at elementary school. No school for him now, too many bills to pay, his dad said.

 

Sam was a young man of eighteen, still skinny, beating his hands bloody against a withered tree. Back and forth they’d shouted while his mother wept. It had started so quietly, a tentative knock on the kitchen door. Sam didn’t want to be a soldier, he told his dad, he didn’t care about China or killing communists. All he wanted was to be a singer, in a bar, on a stage, on the street, he didn’t care. He was a good singer, didn’t everyone say so, Ma? Didn’t they? Every weekend he’d go downtown in all the clubs with his busted old guitar and bring home a cap full of notes and his mother would gasp in delight and kiss his cheeks and then they’d have a proper roast dinner. His guitar only got them thirty dollars at the pawn shop. Then the bus came full of bright-eyed young folks, all chipper and raring to spill some Chinese blood.

 

Sam had his nineteenth birthday on an army base, watching his lovely copper hair tumbling to the floor. Then came the training. Up before the sun, dressed, drilled, beaten down, dragged through mud, drill sergeants screaming inches from his face. Exhausted by dusk, and round and around it went. Then the call came through and off they went west to the ash-plains of California, and beyond. On some nameless beach Sam charged from foxhole to foxhole, hearing nothing but the roar of blood in his ears, watching men get blasted apart by mortar fire, have legs and feet shredded by mines, their brains blown out by sharpshooters, freeze in the icy water, sit hugging themselves behind a wall and sobbing...

 

Sam was a grown man now, twenty-two, and shoring up barricades in some bombed out shell of a building in a Chinese city he couldn’t pronounce. Sam was strong now, six foot two and two hundred and thirty-five pounds, despite the meagre meals the platoon received. He’d only killed six men since they got here, four with his rifle, one with a stolen officer’s sword and the last one with a length of rebar. That last man didn’t go quickly or quietly, and Sam didn’t need to understand Chinese to know what he was screaming. But the fort was theirs and the day won. A jubilant platoon came to congratulate him, but their voices might have been the wind for all he heard them. He looked down at the metal bar, stained with blood and pieces of skull, rooted in place and shaking. The medic found him sitting beside the mangled Chinese corpse, eyes blank and unseeing. The men were miserable. This was _Sam_ . Sam never moaned, never snapped, never _stopped_. The next ship took him home, and the doctors did what they could.

 

Then Sam was a husband at twenty-six. Nora was kind and stubborn and fierce, he was big and soft and mellow. She never once complained when his night terrors kept her awake. Thick as thieves their friends called them. Inseparable. Then the news came and they were over the moon. Sam built a crib, the toys, the pram, everything. Shaun arrived and they cried happy tears, he was just perfect, with his dad’s eyes and coppery hair, and Sam sang to him every night.

 

Then it was over. Sam woke from the dream in a sterile old Vault. He staggered past the dusty bones and peeling walls to see the rad-blasted landscape, dead when once it had been verdant. Muttering the names of his wife and son he stumbled back to his ruined house. Codsworth had done his best but it wasn’t the same. Shaun’s blanket was a paper-thin rag now but he clutched it to his chest all the same as he curled up against the wall.

 

Sam was a wandering soul at twenty-nine, a coat, a hat and a teal scarf. He built himself a gun, the best in the Commonwealth, and he hunted the scum and the savages to their holes and killed them all. The Hand of the One, the Raiders soon knew that gun by name. And Sam became the Fallen. The Fallen could do things that Sam couldn’t, could hurt people who deserved it. Sam was still in that Vault, still sobbing under Shaun’s crib. But the Fallen couldn’t exist by itself forever. It reconciled with Sam Halloran and he began to build things again, began to heal. He had people he could protect again.

 

Then Sam wasn’t alone anymore. His friend, the skinny, bruised and beaten little merc needed him. They fought together, bled for each other. Then by firelight they became more than friends. But there was a price, a secret shame of Sam’s to fall into MacCready’s bed so soon. He missed Nora to the ends of the earth. But she was gone, and Sh- _Father_ hadn’t shed a tear. Now the Institute had lost its patience, and his world came crashing back down. Something broke inside him and the Fallen vanished from the Commonwealth without warning.

 

The battered old sign read ‘Pe...syl...nia’. MacCready shouldered his rifle and followed the fading sun westward. Alone, yet unafraid.

  



End file.
